Famous Dave's: best of both worlds: Sassy BBQ Salad offers well-known barbecue taste with healthful benefits for calorie, carb counters

Nation's Restaurant News, May 10, 2004 by Kerri Conan

In barbecue lingo "meat 'n' three" means smoked meat with a choice of sides. True aficionados usually take their barbecue with beans, fries and cornbread, while the health-conscious diner might reach for a more delicate combo of slaw, potato salad and peach cobbler.

Now toss Famous Dave's Sassy BBQ Salad into the mix. Rolled out last summer as a limited-time offer, the meal-size tangle of greens, bacon, cheese and tomato has earned a regular spot on the menu. What's more, the item earned the restaurant chain Nation's Restaurant News' 2004 MenuMasters Award for Best Single Product Rollout.

It takes more than ordinary salad to lure the meat-and-potatoes crowd into a big bowl of meat and lettuce. The secret to that success story is a dynamite dressing and the same smoked pork, brisket, ham and chicken that make Dave's restaurants--well--famous.

"Our goal was a comfortable-looking salad with a big bold flavor that would remain true to our concept," says Dan Conroy, director of food and beverage for the 92-unit restaurant chain, based in Eden Prairie, Minn. Famous Dave's is a casual, full-service, fun restaurant and bar, he explains, just a couple of notches up from a backwoods barbecue joint. Every table gets its own roll of paper towels, and so a froufrou or dainty presentation was completely out of the question. "We didn't want the dish to look too constructed or built."

Instead, Conroy and his colleagues designed a salad that could do the heavy lifting. Before the Sassy line, Famous Dave's offered two meal salad options: a chicken Caesar with grilled, chilled and sliced breast meat and a mixed-greens salad topped with crispy fried chicken tenders. Together they accounted for about 4 percent of the product mix, according to Lane Schmiesing, vice president of marketing.

The Sassy Salad quickly claimed 8 percent of the menu during the item's initial introductory promotion. Nearly a year later, with the salad as a regular feature, Schmiesing says, that number holds steady at just under 6 percent. Company sales are just under $200 million.

And that's not bad for a dish that began in the trenches, right on the line of one of the chain's busiest units. Last spring Conroy noticed that cooks were eating a lot of salads, carefully composed, topped with barbecue meats and tossed with their own dressing concoctions. "I'd see them combining different ingredients from the menu and then mixing up little bowls of vinaigrette," he says. "It was like they were 'Iron Cheffing' their way through lunch."

Soon Conroy, Schmiesing and their teams went to work. Segmented consumer research--which at Famous Dave's takes the form of exit and phone interviews--indicated that customers would be willing to try a special barbecue salad. "Our competitors had strong and distinctive salads," Schmiesing notes. But they are nothing exactly like the Sassy concept, which could take advantage of a growing interest in healthful dining options.

The dish was in development before the whole low-carbohydrate craze boomed, though the timing couldn't have been better. "Everyone isn't health conscious 100 percent of the time," says Carolyn Wells, executive director of the Kansas City Barbeque Society. "But salads are a viable alternative, especially for people who want to eat barbecue but are counting calories or carbs or whatever."

As soon as the interest level was confirmed, the Famous Dave's team began honing the operations side. The dressing was crucial, Conroy says. It had to be slightly sweet to complement the natural smokiness of the meat, while the overall flavor profile had to remain bold. Some creaminess would be good for balance, but since the salad was to be pretossed, it couldn't be too thick either. And of course, the dressing had to be a signature--house made and unique.

After field testing seven or eight favorites from the development process, a clear winner emerged and was dubbed Honey BBQ Dressing. Naturally, neither Conroy nor Schmiesing would reveal much about the ingredients, other than to say they do contain barbecue sauce and are mixed in each unit from components.

Next came the presentation. To smooth out execution on the line, when a salad is started, a ticket goes to both the cold station and the "cut" station, where the meat is sliced and sauced. The salad cook adds some of the toppings to a portion of greens, tosses it with a drizzle of dressing and plates it all in a chilled bowl. A final sprinkling of cheese, bacon and green onions is scattered around "sort of messy-like," Conroy says. The hot, sliced meat goes on next, topped by another short dose of dressing. Servers have been trained to take salads out immediately so they don't sit under the warming lights.

This summer a second Sassy Salad line is on deck for rollout and promotion in a limited-time offer, with the usual menu insert and collateral support. But according to Schmiesing and Conroy, for an item to go from there to the regular menu, it has to answer Dave's most famous question: "How far would you drive for that?" It looks as if Sassy Salads are ready for the long haul.